The emergence of the World Wide Web has brought to attention yet another “web”—the social web. While social sciences have extensively studied various aspects of societies and social interactions, current models for studying social networks are not rich enough to analyze several important social phenomena.
One important emerging class of problems in social networks involves relying on real people to answer specific questions. Within this context, one can assume that any two nodes (people) in a social network are connected by short paths (i.e., the so-called “six degrees of separation” property). Moreover, expertise tends to be distributed throughout a social network such that, for any query, there is a node within the network for whom the answer to the query is easily at-hand. Thus, in general, there exists, for most queries, a node on a short path from the query originator who has a good answer to the query. The problem, however, is that while a short path to a query's answer may exist within the social network, that path is typically hard to identify. Moreover, existing applications for searching for content do not provide adequate means for generating new, socially mediated content.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for knowledge generation and deployment in distributed social networks.